Mad Max: Fury Road

I had heard that the new Mad Max movie was good, but to be honest, I was completely unprepared for how good it was. Between the relentless action scenes, the seamless special effects, the stunts, and the story and characters, I can honestly say that Fury Road has probably been my favorite movie that I’ve seen all year.

Believe the hype. This one lives up to it.

You know the story: Oil and gas are running out, wars have been fought, and civilization has fallen. In the desolate wasteland of the old world, a guy named Max wages war on the roads making him some sort of… highway warrior. Max, however, is captured by the the War Boys, the army of tyrannical of a cult leader named Immortan Joe. There, Max gets caught up in the escape of several of Joe’s favorite girls and becomes a reluctant partner with Furiosa, the woman trying to free the girls from Joe’s horny little clutches.

Mad Max has a lot to satisfy everyone: crazy car chases, over the top stunts, and a relentless pace that fits the movie perfectly. The characters feel real, the environment feels real, and the musical score is absolutely amazing. When these characters succeed, you love it… when they die, you mourn.

Above all else, though, Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie that is unique. It’s a barely contained dose of beautiful insanity, all engrossing, disturbing, and wonderful at the same time. This is a movie that could have easily been nothing more than a brainless actioneer, but it puts real and tangible effort into being something different and something special and it succeeds in wonderful ways.

Fury Road manages to do all of this without being uppity and pretentious as well. This is just a completely different animal than the generic stuff that gets released into mainstream and it is wonderful.

More than that… Mad Max is fun and, with a movie like this, that means a lot.

I loved it. Totally loved every insane moment of this beast. This is the type of movie that runs you down and makes you love it.

Kind of sucks when you realize that George Miller came very close to directing Justice League, doesn’t it? I’m sure whoever didn’t think he could handle that movie is probably working at the same McDonalds with the guy who didn’t think Joss Whedon could do Wonder Woman.

Chilling Tales

The city of London seems to be filled with haunted houses, but perhaps the most infamous of them all was number 50 Berkley Square, an address that all of London knew to stay out of… lest they face the nameless horror within.

Movie Reviews

Though I don’t like war movies, Dunkirk is an incredible example of the genre. It shows that heroes don’t necessarily wear uniforms and that bravery comes in all shapes. It shows that not everything ends happily with heroes skipping off into the sunset when war is involved and that heart is the greatest weapon a human can have.

It’s not remarkable and it’s not terrible, it’s in that nondescript gray area inbetween which, to me, is worse than being bad. Almost twenty years after it was shat into theaters, people still talk about how bad Batman and Robin was or how bad Lost in Space was, but at least they’re remembered. In twenty years, no one will remember Valerian short of an occasional airing on FXX or SyFy… it will be resigned to the obscurity of the forgotten which is a terrible fate for what should have been art.

Television Reviews

Daniel Salazar is alive and he’s probably a little pissed off that everyone left him at the Mexican mansion and just assumed he was dead. Well, you know what happens if you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption because NO ONE makes an ass out of Daniel Goddamn Salazar! That’s right, Daniel Goddamn Salazar, the man who can walk out of a burning building and through the desert in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and through Mordor for good measure. You don’t mess with this guy. He will jack you up.